Conferences 2016
ANDREW LADIS TRECENTO CONFERENCE
10-13 November 2016, New Orleans, Tulane University. Deadline for submissions 20 February 2016. Read abstract
The keynote speaker will be Marvin Trachtenberg, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Thanks to the generous support of the Kress Foundation and other benefactors, we will not be charging any registration fees for this conference. Participants will be responsible for securing their own transportation and lodgings. More information, including options for lodgings, will be posted soon on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/LadisTrecentoConference/) as well as on a Tulane website. Conference registration can be found at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/andrew-ladis-trecento-conference-tickets-20459979349. This will be the inaugural Andrew Ladis Memorial Trecento Conference and we are very excited! The plan is for the conference to be held every other year, with a new venue and host institution each time. The 2nd conference will be hosted by the University of Houston in Houston, TX, in fall 2018.
ON THE EVE OF REFORMATION: THE VIEW FROM THEN AND NOW?
21-22 October 2016, Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada. Deadline for proposals: 31 March 2016. Read abstract
This interdisciplinary conference seeks, therefore, to take the pulse of European history and culture in two different ways: from our perspective as early twenty-first-century scholars and from the perspective of late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century writers and artists. In so doing, the conferences seeks to cast its eyes on both the Old World and the New, Europe as well as in its African and Asian extensions, history as well as the arts, society as well as events.
For further information on the conference, please contact the organizers, Prof. Elizabeth Cohen (ecohen@yorku.ca) and Prof. Konrad Eisenbichler (konrad.eisenbichler@utoronto.ca). For further information on the TRRC, please visit its web site at:http://www.itergateway.org/trrc/
HYBRID REPUBLICANISM: ITALY AND AMERICAN ART, 1840-1918
6-7 October 2016, Rome. Read abstract
EARLY MODERN ROME 3 (1341-1667) The resounding response to both previous Early Modern Rome conferences in May 2010 and October 2013—76 papers from 9 different countries and 119 papers from 12 countries, respectively—mirrored the complex mix of the city itself and the changing face of early modern studies. We encourage papers from a range of disciplines—history, art and architectural history, literature, music, dance, religious studies, philosophy, history of medicine or science, diplomacy, gender, or others—to bring together in a single venue those whose research focuses on the city of Rome and the Roman countryside. As with EMR2, the first two days of the conference will take place in the city at the cultural institutions in and around piazza dell’Orologio, and the last day of the conference will instead be held at the Orsini-Odescalchi Castle in Bracciano. Given that the organizers wish to foster dialogue with other researchers, we encourage the submission of single papers rather than complete sessions. Complete sessions will be accepted, although we reserve the right to reconfigure them on the basis of other proposals. Organizers: Paolo Alei and Julia L. Hairston Conference website: conference.eapitaly.it Conference sponsored by the University of California, Rome with ACCENT and with the collaboration of the Istituto storico italiano per il Medioevo, the Archivio storico Capitolino, the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, and the Orsini-Odescalchi Castle.
5-7 October 2017, Rome, University of California, Rome. Read abstract
PURITY AND CONTAMINATION IN RENAISSANCE ART AND ARCHITECTURE
1 October 2016, Cambridge, MA, MIT. Read abstract
Participants: Joseph Ackley, Amy Bloch, Rachel Boyd, Lorenzo Buonanno, Michael Cole, Jodi Cranston, Lauren Jacobi, Caroline Jones, David Karmon, Joseph Leo Koerner, Stephanie Leone, Jessica Maier, Carolina Mangone, Christopher Nygren, Pamela Smith, Luke Syson, Jane Tylus, Michael Waters, Carolyn Yerkes, and Daniel Zolli. This event is the Fall 2016 New England Renaissance Conference. It is co-organized by Lauren Jacobi and Daniel Zolli. To register and for more information, click here or web search “MIT HTC Purity and Contamination”. The conference takes place from 9:30 am to 6pm in the Bartos Theatre on the MIT campus.
FOURTH ANNUAL SYMPOSIUM ON MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES
20-22 June 2016, Saint Louis, Saint Louis University. Read abstract
The plenary speakers for this year will be Barbara Newman, of Northwestern University, and Teofilo Ruiz, of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The Symposium is held on the beautiful midtown campus of Saint Louis University, hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. On-campus housing options include affordable, air-conditioned apartments and a luxurious boutique hotel. Inexpensive dorm meal plans are available.
All sessions take place in state-of-the-art classrooms and auditoriums with complete audiovisual facilities. All sessions, events, meals, and housing are located within easy walking distance of each other. A rich variety of restaurants, bars, and cultural venues are also only a short walk away. During their stay, participants are welcome to utilize the Vatican Film Library as well as the rare book and manuscript collections of the nearby Pius XII Library. Those interested in using the Vatican Film library, should contact Susan L’Engle (lengles@slu.edu) by email or phone at 314-977-3090. Participants may also use the library’s regular collections, which are especially strong in medieval and early modern studies.
GOLD: THE UNIVERSAL EQUIVALENT OF GLOBAL DREAMS, DESIRES, ARTS AND VALUES IN EARLY MODERN HISTORY
9-10 June 2016, Florence, Villa I Tatti. Read abstract
NEGOTIATING LIMITS BETWEEN EARLY MODERN SOVEREIGNTIES: VENETIAN DALMATIA AND OTTOMAN BOSNIA, 15th-EARLY 18th CENTURIES
25-28th May 2016, Zadar, Croatia. Read abstract
“In the modern conception [of political life], state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. Hence, paradoxically enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires (…) were able to sustain their rule over immensely heterogeneous, and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of time.”–Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
In his landmark book Benedict Anderson described the proprietary relationship to land on the part of the bounded state, a geo-body belonging to the order of modernity, for which the national survey map may stand as an index. He then alluded to the paradoxical ease with which earlier and often geographically disjointed states managed the permeable edges of their territories.
This three-day conference offers a different set of assumptions when it comes to “the older imagining” of empire, before the rise of nationalisms in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the operations employed by early modern states in ongoing efforts to establish or maintain peaceful relations as neighbors while managing the heterogeneous and often mobile populations in the interstices of their rule.
The conference is part of a larger collaborative project examining the geopolitics of borderlands in early modernity (https://binghamton.academia.edu/KarenedisBarzman). Given the current configuration of the scientific committee, our initial focus is on the historically dense contact zone between Venetian Dalmatia and Ottoman Bosnia–provinces in states of vastly different political and religious orders, with footprints in present-day Croatia. The timeline runs from the fifteenth century, when the Venetians and Ottomans formally acquired territory in the region, to the Treaties of Carlowitz (1699) and Passerowitz (1718), which for the first time established seamless borders between the states via printed maps distributed as public affirmations of binding peace accords. (While these treaties also involved the Austrian Hapsburgs, the conference is limited to Ottoman-Venetian relations due to the rich nature of the archival material and practical matters concerning the fieldwork.) The instrumental use of cartography in detante is taken as a watershed and establishes the temporal end point for the conference.
Suggested paper topics include the composition of negotiating teams and protocols of diplomacy in determining borders (from elaborate gift exchange to the authentication of earlier treaties as points of departure or comparison); the practical aspects of work in the field (travel by foot or mule, provisions and lodging, interviews with local populations, communication via translators, land survey and production of sketches and drawings); the material practices used in marking sovereign limits on the ground (building earthen mounds or piles of stone, carving signs on trees, drilling iron rings into live rock); the spatial practices of borderland populations that hindered the maintenance of detante and, from the perspective of the states, the ability to “live well as neighbors” (a rhetorical trope found in both Venetian and Ottoman political discourse).
The conference will combine formal presentations, round-tables, and a one-day field trip using GPS to map the borders that can be reconstructed with archival material and ground markers, featuring the borders negotiated after the Third and Fifth Ottoman-Venetian Wars (the “War of Cyprus,” 1570-73, and “Long War of Candia,” 1645-69) both of which had significant theatres of operation in the borderlands between Dalmatia and Bosnia. The conference findings and relevant archival material will be made available digitally on the web, followed by publication of the conference proceedings.
Sponsors: University of Zadar; Harpur College, Binghamton University; the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; the Lila Acheson Wallace Special Project Grant, Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Scientific Committee: Karen-edis Barzman (Art History, Binghamton University), Palmira Brummett (History, Brown University), Josip Faričić (Geography, University of Zadar), Egidio Ivetic (History, University of Padua), Kristijan Juran (History, University of Zadar), Richard Lee (The Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University), Lena Mirošević (Geography, University of Zadar), Nenad Moačanin (History, University of Zagreb), Maria Pia Pedani (History, University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari), Walter Panciera (History, University of Padua),Tea Perinčić (The Maritime and History Museum of the Croatian Littoral, Rijeka), Natalie Rothman (History, University of Toronto), Kornelija Jurin Starčević (History, University of Zagreb), Josip Vrandečić (History, University of Split). For questions please contact the conference organizers at kbarzman@binghamton.edu or jfarici@unizd.hr.
AGAINST THE MEDICI: ART AND DISSENT IN RENAISSANCE ITALY
26-27 May 2016, Florence, Archivio di Stato. Conference program. Read abstract
HERS & HERS: WOMEN AS ARTISTS, CLIENTS, AND CONSUMERS
16 April 2016, Sacramento, California State University, Sacramento. Read abstract
3-5 March 2016, Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence. More information. Read abstract
The year 2016 will mark the 450th anniversary of the start of Giorgio Vasari’s renovation of the Franciscan church of Santa Croce in Florence. The goal of this international conference is to revisit, revise, and expand our understanding of Vasari’s work at the basilica, how it relates to Cosimo I’s absolutist political and aesthetic agenda, and the renovation’s impact on the history of Italian Renaissance art. We seek papers in English or Italian that address how Vasari’s renovation altered the structure of the Gothic basilica, affected the works that predated his intervention, or interpret how the Lives of the Artists has influenced our understanding of those works. In addition, we are especially interested in papers that explore topics such as the sixteenth-century additions and alterations to Santa Croce, including the patronage history and iconography of the cinquecento altarpieces, how Vasari’s renovation relates to the history of the mendicant religious orders in sixteenth-century Florence, or how it reflects Cosimo I’s attempts to advertise his power through art and architecture.